Entries in history
(229)

Here’s some trivia on trivia! The history of trivia is mapped out in a board game fasion in The Trivi.al Side of Trivia infographic from trivi.al. The game we love is now an app!

We’re a few days away from releasing our app Trivi.al. It’s in the hands of Apple now and we wanted to share with you an Infographic that we put together on the history of trivia called “The Trivi.al Side of Trivia.”

It’s a fascinating industry with a lot of cool tidbits of knowledge we’ve throughly enjoyed learning about. And, this journey has led us to meet so really cool people from all over the world. We’ve talked with people from New York to London to Warsaw, Poland and many more in between. We’ve loved the journey so far and we hope it continues to grow as we introduce you to the app. Stay tuned and if you enjoy the infographic leave us a comment below. We’ll have some printed versions soon so if your interested let us know. Thanks

As a great way to promote thier new iOS app, Trivi.al created an infographic timeline history fo trivia that starts with taverns (places of ill repute) in Roman times and follows the trail throughout history leading up to their app launch.

Not much in the way of data visualizations, but the illustrations of celbrities, games and gameshows draw in the reader to see if they can recognize any of them. Cool promotional infographic.

Digital technology has transformed and continues to transform every aspect of our lives. In the motor industry, technology developed throughout the years has enhanced our safety and comfort. The introduction of modern safety mechanisms such as lane departure warning and brake assist systems as well as iphone applications such as Driver Reviver and Car Butler has seen technology faithfully assisting drivers in times of need. With technology advancing and disseminating at a rapid rate, Global Positioning System units have already become a staple accessory in Australian cars.

There’s not much in the way of data visualizations in this one, but it does tell a good story about the history of new technology in your car, and what’s coming soon. There’s too much text, but the use of icons and illustrations helps the story.

I’m not sure what all the dead space at the bottom is. Plenty of room for the copyright, company logo, URL to the original landing page and even a mention of the designer.

The History of Memorial Day does a good job of explaining the background history of the Memorial Day holiday in the U.S.

Learn about how we celebrate memorial day and how it was formed in the United States.

We work hard to bring you insight to memorializing a loved one at In the Light Urns. Information provided through graphics can really help communicate the important points and we really enjoy using the infographic approach to discussing memorials. Visit our military urns page for more information on memorializing a veteran.

Nice, clean design that blends the use of data visualizations and icons to explain some of the history. Some basic things are missing at the bottom of the design though: Company logo, copyright statement and the URL to the original landing page. You can’t assume that people who share your infographic will also share additional information from your landing page.

Another great TEDTalk from Hans Rosling called Religions and Babies about the growth of the world population.

Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others — and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions. With his trademark humor and sharp insight, Hans reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates.

In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development—with some surprisingly good news—snaps into sharp focus.

Wielding the datavis tool Gapminder, Professor Rosling is a master at using data visualization to tell his story.

I really like the first two sections of this design, and I think the last section was unnecessary. The timeline and the gun specifications sections do a good job of laying out the data and keeping it simple. The barrel length and the calibers of each model work very nicely. Since the # of Rounds data is quantitative, I would suggest visualizing that as a series of circles instead of a solid bar to better communicate quantity.

The last section adds a lot of text, repeats the data from the second section and makes the overall infographic gratuitously long. The flags showing the country of origin could easily have been added to the earlier sections.

The Eagle Scout infographic is a new design from the Boy Scouts of America, and shows them experimenting with using infographics to share their message. It’s odd that I can’t find any mention of it on Scouting.org, but found it posted on the Bryan On Scouting blog, which is the official blog from Scouting Magazine, and posted in the official BSA Twitter stream (@boyscouts). There’s also a high-resolution PDF file available for download if anyone wants to print it out.

My son just bridged over to Boy Scouts from Cub Scouts, and their national office is here in the DFW area, so I was naturally interested. This is a really good first attempt at an infographic design from their design team, but makes a few mistakes visualizing the data.

Good use of the red, white and blue color scheme. It’s clearly scouting, and specifically related to Eagle Scouts

The data being presented is fantastic since only the BSA would have access to many of these statistics.

I love the choices of imagery used. The embroidered patches and icons used for the scouts keeps the design clean and easy to read. Many BSA publications use a lot of full-color photos of the scouts, and that would have added too much visual noise to an infographic design.

The BSA logo at the top clearly identifies this as an official publication, but it’s missing a title. What should we call this infographic? Why should I read this infographic? Something like “100 Years of Eagle Scouts: By The Numbers” would have worked nicely.

The information included will change over time since the data is a current snapshot of the state of Eagle Scouts. 2,151,024 Eagle Scouts as of what date? The infographic should more clearly identify the date that the data is gathered from, because people will be looking at this for years on the Internet.

Filling unusual shapes to show percentages is always a challenge. With images like the hand icon and the globe you can’t just calculate the height of the colored area like a bar chart. You have to calculate the AREA of the space to be colored, or you end up with false visualizations like these.

The same is true for sizing shapes, like the people icons for the Average Age of Eagle Scouts visualization. You have to size the overall AREA of the shapes to match the data being presented, which is hard with complex shapes. You can’t just change the height.

The space shuttle avoids this issue by only coloring a rectangular shape in the middle, turning it into a stacked bar chart, but the visualization doesn’t match the data. The red colored section is visualizing more than 60 astronauts as Eagle Scouts, when the number shown is only 40.

I love the Eagles by Decade data, but avoid 3D charts. The 3D effect doesn’t add anything to the data being presented and it’s incosistent with the rest of the design. The data tells a great story, and clearly shows that Boy Scouts continues to grow strongly and is a viable organization in the 21st century.

I like this use of the word cloud for Notable Eagles, but don’t change the font sizes because in infographic design this is assumed to convey data. With Brave and Loyal in larger fonts, it implies that these are more important than all of the other virtues. The virtues should all be one, consistent font size, and the names should all be a second font size.

At the bottom, there should be a copyright (or Creative Commons) statement, and a URL for readers to be able to find the original high-resolution version.

In 2011, Enspektos, a health marketing communications innovation consultancy, invited InfoNewt (my company) to be involved in a special project the firm was leading on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products (CTP). As a new federal agency, the CTP is tasked with regulating tobacco products and preventing tobacco use – especially among youth.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (Tobacco Control Act) is an important piece of legislation with many requirements. This infographic illustrates the history, rationale and major events associated with the Act. The Tobacco Control Act provides all of the events, deadlines and requirements in full and should be used as the final resource for information about the Act.

The infographic is yet another example of Gov 2.0, or the effort to utilize a range of digital technologies to improve government transparency and public understanding of how federal agencies function. The original Tobacco Control Act is a 68-page document available online, but in actual practice that isn’t easily accessible or understandable by the general public. The FDA has created several tools to help the public understand the Tobacco Control Act, like a snapshot overview of the Act, an interactive scrolling timeline viewer, a searchable interface and the infographic timeline.

On Wednesday, April 25th, the FDA is holding a LIVE webinar to share the different tools they have created to help everyone access and understand specific information from the 68-page law.

As you might expect from an official government publication, the design went through many iterations of review and revisions. In my opinion, the final infographic is text-heavy, but strikes a balance between optimal design and content that was vetted and approved by many different individuals at the CTP.

Fard Johnmar, Founder and President of Enspektos agreed to answer some questions about the project.

Cool Infographics: How do you think the infographic and other tools will aid public understanding of the Tobacco Control Act and the CTP?

Fard Johnmar: I think the infographic and other tools are an important step for the federal government. Transforming dense and complicated legislation into simple, visually appealing information products is a very difficult process. You have to balance the wish to make things clear and concise with a requirement that information be as accurate and complete as possible.

We had two primary goals: The first was to improve the public’s understanding of the Tobacco Control Act. The second was to get people within FDA comfortable with using new tools that help visually communicate important regulatory and public health information. Now that this project is complete, I think FDA will be looking for other ways to communicate about its mission and activities in more visually appealing ways.

Cool Infographics: Do you see other health and medical organizations using visual communications techniques?

Fard Johnmar: Absolutely. In fact, since we published the Empowered E-Patient infographic a few years ago, I’ve seen a number of health organizations using infographics to communicate about a range of topics, including GE for its Healthymagination project (click here for a few sample infographics).

Cool Infographics: How difficult was it to push the infographic through the FDA approval process

Fard Johnmar: As you can imagine, getting final approval for a novel visual project like this can be difficult for large organizations. However, there was a real passion for the project from Sanjay Koyani, Senior Communications Advisor at the CTP and other members of his team. They helped to successfully meet all of the legal requirements and answer the numerous questions posed by colleagues at the CTP. Now there is a higher comfort level at the agency with utilizing these types of visual tools to tell the CTP story.

I truly appreciated being involved in the project, and think this is a really big step towards making the often overly complex information released through official government channels more understandable to more people.

Is there any value in a Slacktivist? Can 500,000 people on twitter actually change something? Is hitting the streets and protesting the only real way to cause social change? Sortable takes a look at the rise of slacktivism, and the power this movement has.

This design does a good job of telling a story to the reader that is easy to understand in a linear fashion top-to-bottom. It starts with the background of “What is a Slacktivist,” then shares a number of behavioral stats about Slacktivists, a few successful Slacktavist campaigns and finally the “10 Signs you might be a Slacktivist” is a self-check for the readers.

The illustrations are mostly relevant, and the overall design isn’t too crowded with information. I don’t understand some of uses of the social media icons, like why is Twitter representative of volunteering and Facebook representative of taking part in events? They missed the opportunity to visualize some of their data point too, like the Red Cross stats related to the Haiti earthquake. Even at least an illustration of five days on a calendar would help.

Even though there are a lot of Sources, they were thorough and correctly included them in the infographic design. They are also listed on the landing page, but none of that text gets carried along when someone reposts the infographic.

The bottom of the design is missing a copyright statement, and it would be nice to give the designer credit. Readers are generally more receptive to a design when the designer is mentioned because it comes from somebody and not just a corporation.

Dota, Defence of the Ancients, is the latest hype in gaming. Initially developed as a modified game in Starcraft, the concept has now grown globally and has even made its way into professional competitions. Popular game titles that have implemented the “DotA” concept include Warcraft 3, DotA Allstars, DemiGod, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth and Realm of the Titans. Two more upcoming titles that will certainly get the gaming world’s attention are DotA 2 and Blizzard DotA.

So what is DotA exactly? Our trusty graphics boffins have once again created the infographic below for the complete history on how the new genre came about.

The design style is certainly relevant to the game look-and-feel itself. The timeline is odd that some events don’t have specific dates identified. The use if icon illustrations for different concepts and company/game logos on the timeline helps the reader. I would have liked to see some of the stats behind the game and its popularity.

Augusta National Golf Club has undergone continuous modification since hosting its first Masters Tournament in 1934. This graphic depicts the more than 100 major changes made to the course over the past 79 years. At the top is a visual side-by-side comparison of each hole for 1934 and 2012. Below the hole comparisons is a timeline that maps tee, fairway and green area changes year-by-year. The combination of visual comparison and detailed timeline provides a sweeping overview of all the major changes made since 1934.

This is a great design that demonstrates how simple visuals can be used to show the viewer differences between the hole designs. By showing a terrain map of each hole then and now, side-by-side, the poster is easy for viewers to compare the changes and enjoy.

You can buy the 40” x 24” inch poster for $34.95 and definitely check out the zooming viewer to see the poster up close at Historyshots.com.